Kangaroo Island’s biggest winery False Cape Wines to open $400,000 cellar door

Kangaroo Island’s largest vineyard wants to drive more wine tourism, opening a $400,000 cellar door this summer.

Jamie Helyar from False Cape Wines, which is building a new cellar door on the Dudley Peninsula on Kangaroo Island. Picture: SIMON CROSS

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Kangaroo Island’s largest vineyard will soon have its own cellar door, almost two decades after the business started in the region.

False Cape co-owners Jamie and Julie Helyar are building the $400,000 cellar door at Dudley East, which they say will fill a gap in wine tourism hot spots in the region.

“If I had a dollar for every time someone asked when the cellar door was opening, we would have probably paid it off by now,” Jamie says.

“There’s a real need on this eastern side of the island for more visitation spots to come to.”

The couple will open the cellar door early next month, initially offering tastings, along with platters and light meals and potentially expanding the menu down the track.

It means the business will be able to tap into the island’s tourist scene and more effectively market its own brand.

Jamie says with only about 400 acres of vineyards on the island – 65 of them belonging to False Cape – the region could do with more wineries to cement itself as a destination of choice for wine lovers.

That might happen as the years go by, because its cooler climate provides favourable conditions for growing wine grapes.

“They reckon grapes are going to go really well over here as things heat up,” Jamie says.

He says there were about 30 vineyards on the island during the 1990s, many of them setting up after wool and lamb prices took a dive.

But after things in that sector improved, less than 10 vineyards remain.

Julie says last year, wineries on the mainland had a difficult season because of the hot weather and False Cape was able to plug a gap in wine grape volumes. “We sold some riesling to Clare and some shiraz to Coonawarra,” she says.

“They were really down and we were really happy with the quality that we sent them.

“I think being a cooler climate will increase our potential for the coming years. A lot of the big wineries are buying land in Tasmania because it’s cooler.”

The couple has had vines on Kangaroo Island for about 20 years, and their own label for 15. About a quarter of the business’s grapes go into its own False Cape label; the remainder are sold to other wineries.

At the moment, False Cape’s wine is crushed at Lake Breeze in Langhorne Creek, where Julie’s brother Greg Follett is the winemaker, but the couple will consider setting up their own winery operations in future.

False Cape in June won the titles of Kangaroo Island Wine of the Year, for its Captain Cabernet Sauvignon and Kangaroo Island White Wine of the Year, for The Chardonnay. The titles were announced at the Kangaroo Island Food, Wine and Tourism Awards.

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